I'm very certain that many of you have either seen or used the gesture of holding two fingers up in the air to make a V. The V sign is a hand gesture in which the first and second fingers are raised and parted, whilst the remaining fingers are clenched, palm facing outwards. Originally considered a "Victory" sign (for V as in victory), it also is used to mean "Peace", a meaning that became popular in 1960's by many protesters as a show of defiance or victory, What you might not be aware of is it's origins and how the gesture evolved over the centuries. Most people believe that it originated during the Second World War by English Prime Minister Winston Churchill. That's not entirely true. Here is the commonly believed story and how Churchill came to popularize the V sign.

To fully understand where the gesture came from we have to go back in our time machine to England in the 13th Century. During that period of history, England and France fought the Hundred Years War over who would be the rulers of France. though it's not entirely correct to call this conflict by it's common name as the war actually lasted over 115 years. Though France finally won the war, England won many of the battles and as is common in many world conflicts, they won them with new technology :The longbow. The English longbow was a powerful weapon measuring about 6 ft 6 in long, and was used by the English for both for hunting and as a weapon of war. The longbow had a long range and high accuracy in an era that still saw masses of armored men and horses attack and any good bowman could pierce most armor of the time with ease. In its day, it was considered amazingly accurate and, by the standards of the day, it was. In that era before the invention of the musket, the bow was highly useful. Though the weapon cannot compare to even the first guns, an archer could hit a person at 180 yards most of the time and could always hit an army when archers were massed. The weapon was so effective in battle many English Kings banned sports and most leisure activities so that the peasantry could practice their skills as it took great strength and many hours of practice to pull the bow and shoot accurately and quickly. In fact though Golf was invented in Scotland during this time, the game was banned in England until Henry VIII's reign when, by that period, the longbow had been supplanted by the musket.

The English use of longbows was effective so against the French during the Hundred Years' War, The English were able to win most of the battles, particularly at the start of the war in the battles of Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). and most famously at the Battle of Agincourt.It is that battle that the first recorded usage of our sign came from. Some of you might be familiar with the battle from either Shakespeare's play Henry V or the two films based on it. It was the greatest conflict of the war and was England's greatest victory until Waterloo. During that battle longbow archers virtually wiped out the cream of the French nobility and permanently ended the era of the armored knight in war. However though, the French were still very arrogant in their feelings toward the English, they did fear the longbow. During battle the mounted knights would charge through the archer's ranks attempting to hack off either their hands or their fingers to render them ineffective. During the Battle of Agincourt it is believed that, according to a popular myth the two-fingers salute and/or V sign derived from the gestures of archers raised their second and third fingers, the fingers that they used to pull back the bow strings, meaning the gesture as a sign of defiance and as an insult. Though no account written in the era that it occurred in survives proving this story ,most historians believe that in an period of history when important nobles were often captured and held for ransom, the French had little interest in capturing or even mutilating a commoner as they would be of little value and were thought as being expendable.

The belief that the V sign originated among archers might have its origin in the work of the English/French historian Jean Froissart (c. 1337-c. 1404), who died after the Hundred Years War took place. In his major work "The Chronicles of England," he recounts a story of a group of English solders (not necessarily archers) waving their fingers at the French during a siege. Interestedly enough however, he makes little reference to which fingers were used, meaning that this is not evidence of the origin of the V sign .It's quite interesting to note here that Froissart was one of Shakespeare's major reference sources for his history plays, and I find it quite interesting that he never used or mentioned the sign in Henry V leading me to believe that it's usage goes back much farther than Agincourt.

Lets jump ahead in our time machine a few centuries to 1940 and the start of the Second World War. It was England's darkest hour and invasion from Germany was thought to occur any day. In the fall of that year after the defeat of France, the government changed hands and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Not only was he a political Churchill was also an author and student of history. Looking for some way to rally the English population he discovered (though no one knows quite when) the Agincourt references to the V gesture. Though my sources for this article differs as to when Churchill started using the sign I am totally certain that he meant his gesture as an insult, sort of an "Up Yours Hitler !" in the way that the English long bowmen first used it, rather than as a sign of impending or future victory. At first Churchill gave the sign with his palm down (and most often with one of his trademark cigars in between the fingers and you can take that symbolism where you wish, because I'm not going there in this article) and later palm out though I've never seen any film of him with the latter usage. Another layer is also added to it's meanings at this time. Douglas Ritchie at the BBC discovered that the first notes of Beethoven's Symphony #5 in C had the same rhythm as the Morse code for the letter V (three dots and a dash). With Churchill's blessing on July 21,1941 the BBC sent a all band broadcast to every occupied country and various resistance groups instructing them to use both the V sign and the Beethoven rhythm for their own defiance.

Soon V's were chalked all over Europe, on streets, on walls a V was even found in the men's washroom of the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo. What helped the usage catch on was that in many European languages, the word for victory started with a V so that each resistance group could associate the meaning not only in English but in French, Dutch and other languages. For the rest of the war not only did the Germans run into the V everywhere, the BBC used the Beethoven phrase to open each news program or a report of a victory as on June 6,1944,D-Day. I find it very ironic that it was a German composer that signaled not only victory but the "Hand of Fate" and the ultimate defeat of the Nazi's and Hitler.

Lets take one more jump in our time machine to the 1960's and the Vietnam Era. At various points in his political career, President Richard Nixon used the V sign as a gesture of victory(palm in) or triumph. In fact he became so associated with it you couldn't imitate him without raising both hands with this gesture (see any performance of mimic Rich Little). However the hippies of the day often flashed this sign (palm out) while vocalizing the word "Peace", and it became popularly known (through association) as the peace sign. Originally, however, its symbolic meaning was love; signing "love" and saying "peace" was a mutual greeting some time during this decade young people started picking up on the sign and changing it's meaning. I also believe that the counterculture also meant the gesture as sign of insult as the English bowmen and Churchill did. By changing the meaning, the youth of the 60's not only helped extend it's life but removed the gesture from the taint of war, putting the focus on peace though it is still used both ways.